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Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century
Hardcover
Biographies GeneralTravel WritingFrench History
Publisher Price: $30.00
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ISBN10: 1541704827
ISBN13: 9781541704824
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: Jun 4 2024
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781541704824
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: Jun 4 2024
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
An entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little. When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other
plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the Grand Paris project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian clichés.
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